Why argue over trivia?

Scott Sumner has a very interesting take on why we spend so much time arguing over the little stuff and ignoring the big stuff:

I would like to argue that most of the really important public policy issues are not even part of the ongoing debate in the press. Here are some examples:

1. The huge rise in occupational licensing.

2. The huge rise in people incarcerated in the war on drugs, and also the scandalous reluctance of doctors to prescribe adequate pain medication (also due to the war on drugs.)

3. The need for more legal immigration.

4. The need to replace taxes on capital with progressive consumption taxes.

5. Local zoning rules that prevent dense development.

6. Tax exemptions for mortgage interest and health insurance.

These 6 policy failures impose enormous damage on the country, far more than the issues typically discussed on the evening news. Why aren’t they discussed? I would argue that it is partly because the disagreements tend to break down on values, not ideology. Most idealistic intellectuals agree with me on all of these issues. They are not issues that divide the left and the right. It’s also true that most real world politicians agree on these issues. However their views are exactly the opposite of the views of intellectuals. Hence there is no “policy debate” in either the political or intellectual arenas, and hence no “fight” for the media to report. They become invisible issues.

I've written about a few of those things in the past. Even local news seems to focus on "small in the grand scheme of things" issues. For example, the school Superintendent search has dominated local news for the last month or two. But how important is the Superintendent in the grand scheme of things? It seems to me we like to think that a Wise and Strong Leader will Lead Us to the Land of Milk and Honey, but in reality how our kids do in school is really much more a function of how we treat them at home than who is pushing pencils in the head office.

Yeah, yeah, I'm probably underestimating the impact a great superintendent can have on a school district. But in all the opinion pieces I've seen in the local news about the superintendent search I don't recall seeing even one person explaining exactly HOW a great superintendent might vastly improve the screwed-up school system we're stuck with...

Fear of change is rational

I wrote last week about upgrading my DSL service, and finished with a sarcastic "what if I can't get on the Internet at all. Nah, that'd never happen."

Well...

It WAS faster, but the network connection started randomly dropped for a minute or two every hour or so. A very nice Verizon repair person just left after spending four hours here fixing problems with the wires both inside and outside the house. Our house was built in 1862, so I expect to run into issues whenever we upgrade anything. I have faith that my new and improved phone lines will make my life a little bit better over the years, which will make up for the time I lost talking with Verizon to fix the glitches.

Now if we could just fix the glitches in our health care and political systems I'd be a really happy camper.

Wise and Powerful Leaders ?

The last time I got really worked up over a presidential election was 1984, when Ronald Reagan was re-elected president. I was a freshman in college, and completely, 100% convinced (along with a majority of my classmates) that Reagan was the dumbest, laziest, worst president in history. I was stunned on election night to see that the rest of America (except Minnesota and Washington, DC) disagreed.

My political views have changed a lot since then; mostly, I'm a lot more skeptical-- of the rhetoric from both Lefties and Righties, of course, but I'm also much more skeptical of the whole notion that our Wise and Benevolent Leaders will guide us safely through whatever crisis is currently worrying us.

Yes, it matters who we choose as president. But I believe it matters a whole lot less than we think.

We have a powerful need to feel like somebody is in control, and I think our pattern-matching brains are eager to congratulate or blame whoever happens to be "in charge" when good or bad things happen. God or the Devil. Reagan or Carter.

We're generally too busy or too lazy to figure out what our leaders actually do control, and we seem to be unwilling to admit that large parts of our lives are outside of anybody's control. So we continue to trust that we can build levees to protect our cities from mother nature and elect politicians who we trust will appoint wise bureaucrats who will keep our skies and borders and food safe. Elect the right people, we think, and everything will be perfect.

So: I'm not particularly worked up about this presidential election. I'm going to vote for Obama, because one of the things that the president certainly does control is the US military, and I think Barack will use the military more wisely than McCain. I hope that he will restore some of the checks and balances we've lost since the 9/11 tragedy; the real brilliance of our system of government isn't that we've had particularly Wise and Benevolent leaders; it's that we have a system that works pretty well even if the people in it are imperfect (as we all are).

Pot Luck or Banquet?

I've been thinking a lot about central planning versus spontaneous order lately, and wondering if my personal preferences are clouding my thinking.

For example, I like the typical pot-luck dinner better than the typical catered banquet. I like not knowing exactly what will be there, and I like trying new things. I don't like the "would you like the beef, chicken, or vegetarian?" question; I always want to answer "give me a little of all three."

My political preferences match my culinary tastes. I don't want to choose between Democrat and Republican, I'd like to have a little of each, please. And I don't want the government to create a least-offensive solution for whatever problem I might face, whether it's what kind of school my kids attend or what type of health insurance I think is best for me. I'd rather have a gloriously chaotic array of choices that I can try or ignore.

I'm probably atypical-- I bet most people would choose a safe, boring catered meal over a riskier but more exciting pot luck. I can hear them now: "What if everybody decides to bring a lime Jello^® salad?" I suspect that the same type of irrational fear of the worst-case scenario drives a lot of government programs, policies and laws that I think we'd be better off without.

But maybe they're being perfectly rational, and they just value consistency and safety a lot more than I do. Either way, I kinda wish they'd stop making me pay for stuff I don't want...

My Most Absurd Belief

The economists at George Mason University take people to lunch and then ask them "What's your most absurd belief?"

What a great question! I think my most absurd economics-related belief is that we'd have just as much technology and entertainment if we got rid of patents and limited copyright to 20 years after publication...

Socialism, as a philosophy, appeals to me. Why couldn't we all just do our best, share with each other, and all be one big happy family?

Unfortunately, Socialism, as an economic or political system, just doesn't work.

But I've got this little nagging voice in my head that says that maybe the digital economy is different. The marginal cost of reproducing a song or software program or digital textbook is, approximately, zero. The laptop computer I'm writing this on contains my entire music collection; it would take me ten days, nine hours and forty-five minutes to listen to it all.

And I just realized that I'm sharing it with everybody else here at Cushman Market. Why not share? It would be extra work for me to remember to turn off sharing every time I disconnected my laptop from my home network; that's a waste of my time. It's more economical for me to be a digital socialist.

Before we know it, our laptops and iPods will be able to store every song and book ever published. We could make all of that information and entertainment available to everybody in the world; wouldn't that make the world a much better place?

But that's absurd. If artists can't sell their songs, or authors can't sell their books, then artists and authors will stop creating new stuff!

I dunno. I have no idea how, but I think it would actually all work out OK if we got rid of almost all of our current intellectual property protections. Maybe we'd have fewer artists and authors, but maybe that would turn out to be just fine. Maybe if people spent less time working to earn money to buy music and books they'd create more music and books themselves.

Uh-huh. And maybe we could get together to form sustainable local organizations of like-minded people and form an ideal society that's in complete harmony with nature.

(stupid hippies....)

Weirdly Rational Real Estate

If you're up for some brain-stretching exercise, listen to Robin Hanson talk with Russ Roberts about signalling.

Our old house in Madison
(Image from Google Maps Street View)

I think I'm missing a signalling gene or two, or maybe that's just my excuse for being a socially inept, introverted doofus. In any case, I sometimes reason myself into doing things... uh, differently.

For example, when we were moving from Madison, Wisconsin I used an unconventional method to find a realtor to sell our house. I sat down and decided what I really wanted was somebody who was really effective at selling houses-- somebody who would sell our house quickly for a lot of money. So I created a little questionnaire:

1. How many listings are you currently handling as the seller's agent?
2. How many buyers are you representing right now?
3. For the last five homes you sold:
   1. How long were they on the market?
   2. What was their appraised price?
   3. What was the sale price?

... and then I visited open houses and gave it to the real estate agents, asking them to fill it out and mail it back to me.

According to the agent who we eventually picked, this didn't go over so well with many of their colleagues. Many were actually offended! We are supposed to find a realtor that we like personally, through word-of-mouth recommendations; somebody with whom we feel like we can develop a good relationship, somebody who we feel like we can trust.

In the language of Robin Hanson, somebody who gives us the right signals.

Especially in the case of realtors, this seems odd to me. I'm hiring somebody (for many thousands of dollars) to help complete a financial transaction; I don't care if I like the person, I just want them to do a good job. Heck, we were moving out of town, so it's not like we were going to be lifelong buddies with our realtor!

I distributed a dozen or so questionnaires, but only received 2 or 3 back. We picked the person with the best track record, and they sold our house very quickly (we had two offers within two weeks) for above our asking price. Yes, this was back in 1998, in the good-old-days of rising real estate prices, and yes, maybe we would have had the same good results if we'd picked any other real estate agent at random. The mystery is: why are we so reluctant to look at objective measures of effectiveness when choosing our realtors, doctors and school teachers?

Attach yourself to the process

I really like this quote from Steven Novella on the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe (my favorite podcast these days):

"Attach yourself to the process, not the conclusion."

We all get emotionally attached to conclusions: "echinacea cured my cold," or "nuclear power is bad," or "natural is good," or "islamo-fascists are a serious threat to this nation," or "drugs cause crime," or "the Federal Reserve was created to steal our money," or "Wal-Mart is destroying America." Our brains are great at post-hoc rationalization; it's why people really and truly believe they see UFOs and ghosts. We are hard-wired to interpret patterns and look for evidence to reinforce what we thinks we already know.

Science gives us a process we can apply to avoid reasoning our way to incorrect conclusions. Scientists commit themselves to the process, and good scientists are willing to admit that they are wrong if experimental results contradict their hypotheses.

I wish political and public policy debates focused more on process and less on specific issues. Is Universal Health Care a worthwhile goal? Sure! Is it the proper role of the Federal Government to either provide it or pay for it? Hang on a minute, let me check the Constitution and see what it says about the role of the Federal Government with respect to health care...

We need more intellectually honest politicians who are willing to attach themselves to the process, and not try to subvert the process to get results they desire.

Gotta keep those options open!

Jeff Blaustein points out that one of the rational reasons we might want to spend money on something (like War Memorial pool) is to keep our options open-- if we don't take care of our "stuff", even when we're not using it, then one day, when we need or want that "stuff", we'll find that it's broken beyond repair.

That's a compelling argument... but Chapter 8 of Predictably Irrational, "Keeping Doors Open -- Why Options Distract Us from Our Main Objectives," describes some fascinating experiments which show that people will go to great lengths to keep their options open.

The experiments were pretty simple: You sit down in front of a computer which shows you three doors. Click on a door and you're shown a room where you can click and earn (real) money. The rooms give out different amounts of money for each click-- for example, one might give a random amount from 2-6 cents, another 1-4, and the third 4-10. You're told that the rooms are programmed this way (but you're not told what the payouts are). You have 200 clicks to try to make as much money as you can.

Just given that setup, people were rational-- they quickly found the room that seemed to give the most money, and then spent all the rest of their time clicking there.

But make one little change and people become irrational: make a door disappear if it hasn't been visited in the last 12 clicks, and people spend lots of time visiting those lower-paying doors, just to keep their options open.

It looks like we're hard-wired to keep doors open. "I'll keep these pants because maybe one day I'll be able to fit into them again..." After all, the cost of keeping them is small (they only take up a small fraction of your closet space), and, who knows, maybe one of these years I'll actually spend more time exercising and my waist will stop its slow inflation.

So how can we trick ourselves into being more rational? For pants, I apply a rule: If I haven't worn something in over a year, it gets donated to charity. I empty out my closet, save time not trying on pants that don't fit, and make the world a tiny bit better.

For "price anchoring" irrationality, I ask myself "How much am I willing to pay? How much is this worth to me?" before I look at something's price tag. If it costs more, I don't buy it.

Could we come up with similar tricks for thinking about budget issues at Town Meeting? I wonder; if we surveyed Town Meeting members (or, even, everybody in Amherst) and asked "How much money should the Town pay to provide entertainment to one kid for four hours during the summer?" ... what people would say? $5? $10? $50?

I don't know how much a kid's 4-hour visit to the pool costs the Town, but it seems to me that if it costs more than about $10 there's something wrong. Am I a cheapskate?

Pool anchors

I just started reading Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely, and I'm already impressed. Professor Ariely does behavioral economics research at MIT; he runs experiments to show that we often act irrationally, comes up with a hypothesis that might explain why, and then runs more experiments to test his hypothesis.

For example, he shows that we easily get "anchored" to prices; the amount of money you're willing to pay for something is often not really related to how much value you'll get; instead, you'll probably be willing to pay whatever you paid before.

It's a mental shortcut we all unconsciously make. And establishing the initial anchor price can be surprisingly arbitrary. The book describes an experiment where the anchor prices were strongly influenced merely by asking people to write down the last two digits of their social security number and asking "would you pay that many dollars for this?".

I think we're seeing this anchoring effect in the discussions of the Town budget.

Here's a thought experiment:

Imagine a town about the size of Amherst, in the same sort of budget squeeze. You're in charge of that town's budget, and you're looking at about $600,000 in cuts to make your 60 million-dollar budget balance.

A group of citizens approaches you and asks that you spend a measly $90,000 or so on some very good programs-- a second swimming pool downtown and funding for several local human service agencies.

Would you find a way of cutting another $90,000 from your budget to fund the new programs or not?

I would not. I'd argue that the town survived last year without those things, but that we couldn't afford them in the current budget crunch. I would guess that most people would agree.

What would Town Meeting say if I proposed that we carve another $20,000 out of this year's budget to make a really great ice skating rink in Kendrick Park (with skate rentals and hot chocolate maybe...) next winter?

We're irrationally anchored to the things that we already have, and that makes it really hard to give them up even though there might be other, higher-priority things we could (and should!) invest in. I'll keep reading Predictably Irrational; I'm hoping Professor Ariely will give some strategies for overcoming our irrational tendencies.

I'm overconfident

I just finished reading SuperCrunchers, by Ian Ayres, and the big lesson I took away from it was that we're all more confident in our opinions than we should be.

There's a little 10-question quiz in the book, with questions like "what's the unloaded weight of a 747 airplane" and "how old was Martin Luther King, Jr. when he died." You're supposed to give a range of answers large enough that you're 90% certain that the right answer is in that range. 90% confidence on 10 questions means you should get 9 out of 10 correct. You can take the quiz online here to see how you do.

I got 3 out of 10, and I thought I was over-estimating the ranges. Shows you how much I know!

One of the points of SuperCrunchers is that experts are just like the rest of us-- they're overconfident, too. That's why mutual fund managers generally don't beat the stock market indexes, why we're in a stupid war in Iraq, and why medical errors kill so many people every year.

And that's part of why I'm mostly a libertarian. If I screw up and make a mistake because I'm overconfident the consequences aren't dire. When the government screws up and decides to subsidize ethanol production... people in Haiti resort to eating mud cookies because they can't afford to buy corn.

"Only" a Theory

There aught to be a marketing firm for Science. If there was, I think the first thing they'd suggest is that scientists stop using the word "theory" -- as in "the Theory of Evolution," or "the Germ Theory of Disease," or "the Theory of Continental Drift."

Most people hear the word "theory" and think it's a synonym for "opinion." 9/11 conspiracy nuts have theories about how the Illuminati flew holographic airplanes into buildings that they had packed with explosives, and those wacky scientists have their theories on how monkeys evolved into self-deluded, paranoid 9/11 conspiracy nuts. Right?

Nope. The Truthers have a bunch of hypotheses. They'd be on their way to having a scientific theory if they made testable predictions based on their hunches, and then performed carefully controlled and independently reviewed experiments that showed what was predicted. Then they'd have to wait at least a couple of decades to let other people try to disprove or validate their results (or for other people to come up with alternative hypotheses to explain them).

It's hopeless to train people to say "I have a hypothesis on why the cat is barfing on the sofa" rather than "I have a theory..." Science should come up with another word; "Scientific Law" doesn't work (laws are abitrary human-made ideas, changed at the whim of our lawmakers). A word that means "something that is as close to correct as we can figure out, given our current level of understanding of how the world works." Maybe "Reality:"

The Reality of Continental Drift. The Germ Reality of Disease. The Reality of Evolution. Hmm, maybe there's a reason I'm a computer geek and not in marketing...

Intellectual Honesty

I'm deeply skeptical of people who are absolutely, positively convinced that they're right. If you're intellectually honest, then you've got to admit that there's a possibility that you're wrong; that there exists (at least in theory) some collection of evidence that would make you change your opinion.

For example, I believe that all life on earth evolved naturally from primitive organisms. It's possible I'm wrong, and if (for example) an advanced race of aliens landed on the White House lawn and then showed us how they genetically engineered the first tribe of Homo Sapiens then I'd have to reassess my opinion on where humans came from.

I also distrust people with an "us" versus "them" mentality, where "we" must be right and "they" are misguided or stupid or just plain stubborn and wrong. Reasonable people can be completely rational and still disagree about important issues, because they might start with different values or assumptions.

For example, I'm mostly a libertarian. I believe it is morally wrong to force people to do things that they don't want to do, if they're not harming (or threatening to harm) other people.

You might be more utilitarian, and believe that it's OK to force people to do things that they don't want to do as long as doing so is for the greater good of society as a whole. You're not unreasonable, or stupid, or stubborn, or misguided-- you're just starting with different assumptions than I am.

So, what collection of evidence would make me change my mostly-libertarian assumptions? Certainly if Socialist societies had higher productivity or innovation or health or wealth or happiness than Capitalist societies I might change my mind. But they don't.

I'm very interested in behavioral economics; maybe we are hard-wired in ways that cause us to make bad decisions on our own, and maybe our collective "hive mind" can do a better job of making the world a better place. Maybe. If you see any solid, data-driven pieces of evidence supporting that hypothesis, please send them my way!

Yay Amherst Public Works!

In a previous blog post, I said that Guilford Mooring is my favorite Town employee. I think the entire Public Works department deserves praise for their quick response to problems that have been brought to their attention:

• Painting crosswalks in front of the Chinese Charter School
• Adjusting the traffic cushions on Lincoln Avenue
• Fixing the potholes on Hulst road

Thanks! I know I suffer from negativity bias-- I tend to complain about things I don't like, but keep quiet about things I do like. Maybe it's the computer programmer in me, always looking for software bugs to be fixed...

New York Times: Skeptical!

The New York Times magazine has an article today entitled "Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy? (read it here)"

I'm impressed. Lots of great information on why we should be skeptical of epidemiological studies (you know, the ones that result in headlines like "Trans Fats Linked To Higher Risk of Irritable Bowel Syndrome"). I'll have to add to my list of statistics to beware of:

7. Be very skeptical of epidemiological studies that show a correlation between a certain behavior and a certain disease. Until there are an overwhelming number of them all showing a strong correlation, or until a double-blind, placebo controlled clinical study is done, they should be treated as an interesting hypothesis that needs more research.

The Skeptical Approach to Statistics

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
-- Benjamin Disraeli

Sometimes when I use statistical arguments the person I'm talking with will say something along the lines of "you can prove anything by choosing the right statistics." Yeah, but...

My rules of thumb for which statistics to believe are:

1. Never believe statistics you read in a newspaper or popular magazines or blogs. 87.5% of reporters have liberal arts backgrounds, and they're just not particularly good at math/science/statistics. Track down the original source, and see what the researchers actually say. If you can, run the paper through Google Scholar then find later papers that cite the study/paper, and see if all the citations support the same conclusions.

2. Never believe statistics that come from non-peer-reviewed sources. A statistic from the Quarterly Journal of Economics is 99.98% more trustworthy than a statistic from me.

3. Look closely at how close the statistic is to being "signficant." If the statistic is given without any measure of statistical significance, then it's almost certainly bogus.

4. Be very wary of statistics generated from "meta analyses" of a bunch of other studies. I'm told it's much harder (2.6 times harder) to get the math right for a meta-analysis.

5. Beware of statistics that give you differences in risk-- e.g. "doing XYZ decreases your risk of dying by 10%." These kinds of statistics sound impressive until you look at the absolute risk of doing XYZ-- very often, the risk is insanely tiny to begin with. Who cares if you decrease your risk of dying by a shark attack by 99% if you only swim in fresh water, if your chances of dying from a shark attack are essentially zero to begin with?

6. Beware of data mining effects. If you generate enough statistics about ANYTHING, some of them (1 in 20) will be outside the "95% confidence level." Pick and choose the ones that support your point of view and you can pretend that the randomness in the data is ironclad proof that you're right.

In an ideal world of infinite time and resources, I'd sit down with somebody I disagree with and together we'd decide on a statistic that we both agreed would be an unbiased way of measuring whatever we're arguing about (does the minimum wage cause unemployment, is more immigration good or bad for the economy, does capital punishment prevent crime...).

Then we'd go look up the relevant data and generate the statistic, and see who's right. With the astounding quantity of data and research available on the Internet we're getting closer to this ideal.

---

DISCLAIMER: All of the statistics in this blog post are 100% made up.

Fight Evil or Do Good

From John McCarthy, on ideology:

For many politically active people, perhaps most, fighting evil is perceived as more important than doing good.

That's probably just another way of looking at the libertarian/statist axis of political thought, since both lefties and righties like to (irrationally, in my opinion) Fight Against Evil. It's just Evil Corporations for the lefties, and Evil Terrorists (used to be Evil Communists) for the righties.

What is it about computer geeks?

I ran across two other computer geeks with very interesting ideas today on my daily wandering around the Internet.

Robin Hanson is a former computer geek who's now an economics geek. He's a polymath with lots of interesting ideas about lots of things-- his ideas on health and medicine will keep me thinking for quite a while.

Then there's John McCarthy, a retired computer science professor at Stanford who has lots of information about why human progress is sustainable. I've written before that I'm optimistic about the future; I think I'm being rational about that, but maybe it's just the computer geek in me that makes me think the way I do.

What is it about computer geeks that makes us think we're more rational about social problems than people who were History and Sociology and Politics majors? Good computer geeks have lots of problem-solving skills; we're good at taking a big, hairy problem, then applying logic and reason to figure out:
a) what's causing the problem
b) what's not causing the problem
c) how we can fix the problem without causing further problems.
We even have a name for this: "debugging"

Good computer geeks also have the ability to create generic solutions to a set of specific problems, and to figure out how to "scale up" a solution that works for 10 people so it will work for 10,000,000 people. Is it rational to believe that those skills might apply to real-world problems, too?

There is at least one ginormous difference between computers and the real world-- computer geeks are, quite literally, gods over their computers, making them do just about whatever we want them to do. Maybe this god-like power we have over computers has gone to our heads, and we're fooling ourselves that we might be able to invent better political, economic, and social institutions than currently exist.

Does the Scientific Method apply to Politics?

I'm a Skeptic. If you want to convince me of something, show me logic, or numbers, or a double-blind, placebo-controlled scientific study. Anecdotes or arguments that appeal to emotion are entertaining, but, to me, never convincing.

I've been reading and listening to a lot of progressive media lately, and the skeptic in me has been wondering if it's even possible to apply the scientific method to political questions. I think it is possible. Take Venezuela and Hugo Chávez, for example:

1. Develop a hypothesis: "modern socialism" works-- it makes the ordinary citizen healthier and wealthier.

2. Design an experiment to test the hypothesis: measure economic growth in Venezuela, factoring out external forces (like the price of oil). This is the tough part...

3. Run the experiment, and see if the results confirm the hypothesis or not.

I'd like to see more discussion between lefties and righties on what their fundamental political hypotheses are, and see if they can agree on ways of measuring whether or not those hypotheses are correct.

Of course, even if lefties and righties agree on steps 1 and 2, they can always endlessly argues about (3), arguing that real-world factors make the experiment invalid. Most people agree that Communism is a failed economic ideology, but die-hard Communists will argue that it failed in Russia and China only because the governments there did not apply the principles properly, or were corrupt, or....

I predict that Venezuela's economy will be a shambles when Pres. Chávez leaves office. I believe that it's extraordinary growth over the last few years is due entirely to the rise in the price of oil, and has very little to do with the socialist policies of the government¹. Resource-rich countries tend to be cursed with rampant corruption in huge State bureaucracies, and I predict that Venezuela will be no different.

---

¹ Spending oil money on education for everybody is a great idea, and a good long-term investment in a country's future. But I don't think it will be enough to overcome the negative effects of Chávez' other socialist economic policies.

Things really ARE getting better

Amazing presentation by Hans Rosling of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden on the state of the world.

Zero, One, Infinity.

When thinking about solutions to problems, there are three interesting numbers: zero, one, and infinity.

Take the issue of gay marriage. In most states, the answer is one: there is one case where marriage is OK-- a couple consisting of a man and a woman.

In Massachusetts we currently have the infinity solution-- any two people, regardless of sex, can get married. Two men, two women, two transgendered people, two hermaphrodites, or any "one plus one" combination works.

But there's another possible answer: zero. If you can get away with it, zero is usually the best answer; it's as simple a solution as possible ("do nothing"). For marriage, the zero answer is get the government out of the marriage business. Why the heck is government involved in marriage in the first place? "Marriage is a sacred institution" say the fundamentalists, and they're right!

Churches (of all flavors) are the realm of the sacred, not government.